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17 Comments

Q: how do you reward early adopters of your project?

When you release an alpha version of your project in public how do you encourage people to use it?

posted to Icon for group Growth
Growth
on May 14, 2022
  1. 4

    I have a "lock in your price" section. Basically if you subscribe I won't raise prices on you, ever.

    Early adopters have a future discount as prices inevitably rise.

    1. 1

      Trying something similar.

    2. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

  2. 4

    It depends:

    • If they would be users and they took time out of their day to help me and give feedback, an LTD. Especially if they took the time to write a detailed email or interview for 15 minutes.
    • If they are a general alpha user that signs up, then a steep discount at product launch.
    • If they aren’t a user but they gave me valuable feedback, then a gift like dinner or a gift card.

    If you’re trying to get feedback from strangers, then you need to reward them in some way. Even on indiehackers, you can reward with an engaging conversation, follows, and likes.

    ----

    I mean, hopefully your product solves a problem that’s valuable to your users.

    But, there’s a cost as a perspective user. After all, I have to find your site, read and learn about your product, sign up and validate my email address, and then learn how to actually use it. That’s valuable time out of my day.

    If I’m not convinced you’ll solve my problem or if that hassle is just more than I want to deal with right now, I’ll move on.

    1. 2

      ooo we've been trying to get feedback from our users but we havent been so lucky. not sure why it hasnt occured to me to offer personalised rewards!!! thanks for sharing :)

      1. 2

        Hope it helps!! Watcha making?

        1. 2

          saas- affordable digital cfo that works with xero and quickbooks! we're trying to reach our first 10 paying customers and its definitely been a journey!!!

          1. 1

            Cool!! Best of luck to you

    2. 2

      Choose a rewards strategy based on what outcome you received from the person. That makes complete sense to me. Really great points!
      BTW, when you collect feedback from alpha users, do you have a prepared questions survey (so that you get the metrics you expect) or just grab what users think overall (so you can extract the metrics that are valuable to the user)?

      1. 2

        Again, it depends. I try to be respectful of their time. So, if they reach out wanting to talk about, complain about, or suggest something, I may only have time to listen and ask a question or two. For asking your own questions, I’d recommend reading http://momtestbook.com/

  3. 2

    For Wizard's Toolkit I'm giving the early adopters that really provide valuable input and feedback free subscriptions for life for three domain names. My thought is their feedback is invaluable and if their websites are successful using my low-code development library then they will provide both good example/portfolio sites and good testimonials.

    I'm limiting it to 3 early adopters with this deal but I figure that kind of feedback is priceless. Since they host the code on their own servers it costs me nothing except loss of potential revenue.

  4. 2

    You can go above and beyond for those users. Offer a walk through for example and to take feature requests.

    I have an app where users don't pay, like fiver or substack, where money is made on each transaction instead. These apps don't usually give one on one attention. So I gave a lot of attention and assistance to early users.

  5. 2

    What we did when releasing https://datelist.io was keep the prices of the original version for all the early adopter users. Of course, it's easier as we didn't start for free. But, I'm pretty sure early adopters are very happy to see that, even if the prices increased, they are kept on an existing pricing, and it will be forever.

  6. 2

    Anything you give to early players works also go to the latter ones so I don't know why you think they should be treated special. It's a product

    1. 1

      IMO the alpha version of the app can be "raw" actually to require early users to be charged. E.g you are a house cleaning service with many options, but only a few of that options are supported to book via an alpha version of the application.
      So the assumption is the following: users can participate in alpha testing of a product by providing you feedback. But you should engage them to spend their time using your product that doesn't satisfy their major need yet.

  7. 2

    What we've done with Popsy (a website builder on top of Notion) for our early users is that they were able to keep all the features which we've at some point locked only for Pro plan (extended customization, analytics, support for custom code and removed branding), as it was all free when they started using our product. It seemed both fair and right thing to do from our point of view, and thanks to that we've been able to keep a huge base of satisfied users.

  8. 1

    In case of my book Deployment from Scratch people got a better price for buying early.

  9. 1

    This the best app to explore and 100% original

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